Ticket to Ride - Tips & Strategies

Take the short paths. Start grabbing up all the 1 and 2 spot tracks right at the beginning of the game. This will make your opponents have a harder time completing their tickets, but also might open you up to finish some random tickets later.

Don’t even worry about your tickets until a few rounds in. Use the scattered placement of your trains to your advantage while limiting your opponents.

Try to use your trains efficiently, combining multiple routes into one long train. Excepting the black-green trail along the bottom (great for points but highly contested) try to cut across the middle of the map at some point and try to connect the coasts (California to Florida or California to Maine). That will make it so much easier to expand out to cover later tickets with minimum expenditure.

I generally try to go for all the connections that have 6 trains to complete. This will give you 15 points everytime. This is a lot more points then trying to worry about completing smaller destination routes worth less than 10 points. Couple this with one of the east coast to west coast destination cards, and most of the time you will find yourself ahead of the pack.

After having played Europe but not the 1910 expansion, it is possible to take the tunnel rule from Europe and use it in TTR USA.

For routes through the Rockies (east/west), distances of 3-4 need two locomotives, 5-6 cards need 3 locamotives. Then follow the draw three from the pile for any extra cost. This makes it a little more difficult to pass to the west coast from the midwest.

Edit to Add

For those of you who have not played TTR Europe, what this means is that you need a specific amount of locomotive cards to complete a route. For example the 5 orange route from Salt Lake City to San Francisco under the house rules you would need 2 orange cards and 3 locomotives to begin to complete the route. You would then flip over the top three cards from the draw pile and would pay either one orange or locomotive for each orange or locomotive drawn from the top, maximum of 3. If you cannot pay the three drawn cards are discarded and your cards return to your hand. This ends your turn. The amount of locomotives can change for your own house rules

The base game has a rule wherein when there’s three Wilds (Locomotives) in the 5-Draw, they must be shuffled back into the Blind Deck. Now, I’m not that great at shuffling, and I feel bad making the one good shuffler in our group shuffle that big ol’ pile of cards. It slows down the game and is just a whole lot of effort. So we instituted a house rule to keep the flow of the game going.

When three Wilds appear in the 5-Draw Pile, the next player MUST take one of them. I like this because depending on what that player planned to do during their turn, it could either benefit or frustrate them. It can give other players another chance to take control of a route they needed too.

There are a few key places where you can put some blocks for one or two trains! Places like Nashville to Atlanta or Houston to New Orleans! Only do this if you’ve planned your route out well with enough trains left over.

When you are trying to find that elusive colored card, or are just waiting to fill a grey route, don’t be afraid to pick cards from the top of the deck. Often new players will settle for those cards that are face up, because they don’t want to pick up a card they can’t use at all, but drawing from the face down deck can be helpful. It is the best way to get Locomotives, for one thing. And that locomotive you draw is always going to be the right color, even if you save it. Statistically, locomotives are the most common cards that can be drawn, so you have a good chance to drawing something useful. This is much better than trying to wait until that color appears face-up. And besides, you never know what you will turn up…

Grab as many card as possible that have the same route and then try to complete those routes quickly while hoarding cards. Build the routes as long as possible and as many long routes as possible! Focus on your game, make decisions that help you win, do not make moves to jam other players up as it does not usually put you in a better place to win!

or

If you don’t care about winning and love annoying people just spend your time cutting them off!

The first few turns are usually just drawing cards anyway, so we deal each player 5 cards to begin with. The game gets going a little quicker and we don’t have to wait all that time between turns.

Tickets are the key. Building a solid initial route, with a branch or two, makes drawing tickets like drawing instant points. Pair this with “Cynical Grabs” (by Fez) and you have a very strong position.